Can We Tame Apocalyptic Thinking?

Fears of cataclysm have always been with us. It's unreasonable to think that we can transcend them.

I have a guest post over at The Ecomodernist on eco-apocalypticism today. Please go check it out.

It’s a piece that I’ve sat on for a couple years. Part of the reason for that is that I really wasn’t having a really good time when I first drafted a good portion of it. We’ll just say that my expectations for fruitful intellectual exchange and social comradery where I was researching at the time weren’t met and leave it at that.

But I’m glad that I’ve come back to it. In some ways, it’s a response to some of the recent talk about “highbrow misinformation.” I’m not a fan of the term, but if anything is a candidate for being elite misinformation, it’s the recurring refrain that we know for certain that we’re destined for environmental doom.

However, I don’t think labeling my former belief in a coming eco-apocalypse as the product of misinformation would have accomplished much. Just like it does next to nothing to label vaccine hesitancy of MAHA beliefs in that way. Still, even if many environmentalists might be horrified by the comparison, I think thinking about alarmism as not too dissimilar to climate denial and vaccine refusal is helpful. And that’s because the solution isn’t more information or the right information but improving democracy itself.

I get into all of this in the post, so I won’t include any more spoilers here. Enjoy!